UH mulls its future TV options in football

Earlier in the week the presidents and athletic directors of the 12-football playing Mountain West Conference schools gathered in the California wine country.

But a vintage being discussed around the table at Sonoma was 2020 — the year the MWC and the University of Hawaii TV rights agreements are scheduled to expire.

For UH, the expiration of the MWC’s deals with ESPN and CBS Sports also coincides with the June 30, 2020, end of its exclusive local pay-per-view and broadcast television rights contract with Spectrum.

While that might seem a long way off as UH heads into the penultimate football season of the agreement, the school’s contract with Spectrum calls for an exclusive re-negotiation period to begin “not later than 180 days” prior to the expiration of the current deal.

That’s a fast-approaching timeline that brings opportunity, the kind that should inspire UH to delve deeply, and creatively, into its options, including whether or not to retain pay-per-view as we have known it for 16 years.

In a statement this week, the MWC said, “As the MWC enters the final two years of its current broadcast rights structure, the Board of Directors, athletic directors and conference leadership continued their ongoing strategic planning for upcoming negotiations.”

UH President David Lassner, who represents the school on the MWC Board of Directors, said he plans to have discussions with athletic director David Matlin, “on how we will approach this” on both conference and local fronts.

Lassner and Matlin inherited the current local contract from then-Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple.

“Right now we aren’t ruling out anything,” Lassner said. “I mean, the media landscape is changing, too. When I talk to students, they don’t watch TV channels anymore the way we did.”

Amid Facebook, Amazon and other emerging platforms, Lassner said, “So, we need to understand the audience and all of that.”

UH has a deal unique in the MWC if not the 130-member NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision in that it collects no direct share of conference TV rights money.

While the other MWC members divided up the approximately $14.5 million for 2017-18 from the combination of TV rights agreements, UH’s terms of membership allow the Rainbow Warriors to keep their local revenue and only share in the conference pot once all the other members hit $2.3 million each.

That hasn’t been close to happening in UH’s six years in the conference.

Even without UH at the feeding trough, the MWC’s take has been dwarfed by what the Pac-12 and other so-called Power Five conferences rake in, exacerbating the divide between the have and have-nots. Pac-12 members received, on average, $28 million each in 2016 and they lagged behind the Southeastern and Big Ten Conference, who also have their own networks.

For what it does get, the MWC has been compelled to be at the networks’ beck and call, playing a number of late-night and non-Saturday football games to suit ESPN and CBS scheduling.

Increasingly, MWC schools — especially the ones in the Mountain Time Zone — have complained they have taken a beating at the box office for limited TV money and exposure. For example, UH’s Sept. 23 game at Wyoming last season kicked off at 8:15 p.m. (Mountain Time) on ESPN2 and drew less (17,776) than a traditional afternoon game with non-FBS Gardner-Webb (19,051).

The meager TV audience (455,000 viewers) registered a 0.30 rating.

Even Boise State, in its 2017 MWC championship season, saw attendance slide nine percent.

But the Broncos were somewhat cushioned by a deal unlike anybody else in the MWC. To entice Boise State to return to the conference after its flirtation with the Big East in 2012, the conference worked a separate, sweetheart arrangement that assures the Broncos six home games on ESPN and nearly $2 million in additional TV money per year.

The MWC, which has dipped its toes into streaming, has sent signals it might embrace nonlinear options.

Against that backdrop and changing landscape, UH has its own needs to attend to.

While it doesn’t share in the revenue pot, UH games are still subject to being picked up by the MWC’s TV partners and kickoff times moved. Last year, in a 12-game schedule, six of UH’s games were shown by outside carriers costing UH $400,000 since it was unable to fulfill a requirement that it deliver a minimum seven games to Spectrum.

UH has tended to look at the $2.3 million-$2.4 million it usually receives from Spectrum as the equivalent of two sellouts at Aloha Stadium. No small consideration for athletic department bean-counters when football hasn’t produced an actual sellout there in 10 years.

But the question of whether the trade-off — at the box office and in building a following of younger fans — is worth it has been a matter of controversy almost since PPV was adopted in 2002.

PPV was supposed to be a way to bring in fans — and revenue — from those who were unable to get to the stadium. But it also made it easier to stay home, especially when the program’s fortunes went into a slide of seven consecutive seasons without a winning record.

“As we go forward, we will absolutely be reviewing our options,” Lassner said.